I am an evil giraffe. But I'm trying, Nick. I'm trying REAL HARD to be the wizard.

It’s official. AND LET US NEVER PUT A SCIENTIST IN THAT PARTICULAR CABINET POSITION, EVER AGAIN. I don’t actually want to criticize the administration too strongly on this one: on paper, it seemed like a smart idea. In reality, we got Solyndra:

Nothing personal against Chu, but smart in one field does not equal being smart in all of them.

What gave me the idea was something in a posting by Moe Lane on Romney’s trip to Jerusalem, where he wrote: “President Obama did best, with his ever-so-sudden $70 million funding of Israeli missile defense (that’s about .14 solyndras*)”. So, how about the $535 million in Solyndra loan guarantees be rechristened as equaling one “solyndra”? This way, the bridge to nowhere would have cost three-quarters of a solyndra ($398 million), the direct Defense Department costs of the Iraq war were 1,416 solyndras, annual farm subsidies are 43 solyndras, the annual budget of the Commerce Department is 15 solyndras, and so on.

My only quibble on this is that we should define the number as being 500 million, not 535 million. 535 is not as useful a number as 500: the latter is usefully decimal. Or perhaps 540 million? That’s fairly duodecimal. I’m willing to be flexible on this.

Moe Lane

*It’d be more flattering if I could remember whether or not it was original. I don’t remember seeing it elsewhere, but surely I’m not the first person to come up with the basic idea…

In advance of Thursday’s hearing, investigators with the Republican led committee released the latest batch of internal emails it has reviewed. Among them were emails that suggested that Energy officials asked the company to delay layoffs at its California facility until after the Nov. 2 midterm elections.

The two congressmen leading the investigation, Reps. Fred Upton (Mich.) and Cliff Stearns (Fla.) released a statement saying they hope Chu’s testimony will “shed light on key questions about the decision-making inside the Department of Energy and the role of other agencies and officials, from the Office of Management and Budget to the west wing of the White House.”

Secretary Chu will then be expected to beat his breast a bit. Then the President will express his ‘full confidence’ in his ‘embattled’ Secretary, which will be the signal for Republicans to release still more damaging revelations on the subject. Shortly thereafter, Chu will announce his resignation, in order to ‘spend more time with his family.’ End result: one Energy Secretary gone and a ‘tarnished’ administration.

And probably a Republican establishment that might be just a little confused about why the base isn’t happier about this. I mean, Chu’s gone, right? It’s always great to force out a Cabinet member – and there’s limits to what can be done in this sort of thing, anyway. I mean, what does the base expect, jail time?

The Obama administration urged officers of the struggling solar company Solyndra to postpone announcing planned layoffs until after the November 2010 midterm elections, newly released e-mails show.

More accurately, I am relieved that I can still get angry about this. You never know when you’re going to get suddenly numb about the latest batch of incompetent corruption that this Keystone Krooks of an administration seems to almost delight in.

I am in shock. I am in veritable shock. Somebody put together a parody of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecelia…”

…that actually scans.

Meanwhile, in other news: it’s just come out that Solyndra made a last minute lobbying effort to influence Congress’s investigation of the company. Didn’t work, of course – the Republican-led House is in no mood for shenanigans, particularly when they’re shenanigans that started during the Bad Scary Time – but I suppose that they had to try. But don’t worry: no taxpayer money (provided by a Democratic-led House) was actually paid out to try to influence a Republican-led House. Solyndra stiffed the lobbyists on the bill, you see.

Solyndra officials were intensely pressuring Bush administration officials in early January 2009 to approve a government loan for the solar company before the Obama administration took power, according to new emails obtained by Fox News on Friday.

On Jan. 12, 2009, Solyndra CEO Chris Gronet sent an Energy Department official an email marked “urgent” expressing outrage that Bush officials had decided a few days earlier that while the loan application had “merit” it needed further study before officials could move forward with a taxpayer-financed loan.

…you tend to have people working for you that can detect the reek of a rotten deal at fifty paces. And who are possessed with basic business sense. And who know not to give a visibly failing company half a billion of your tax money. In other words: you have pretty much the opposite of the Obama administration, which pretty much managed to muck all of that up. Solyndra, of course, is the corporation that parlayed a cozy relationship with the Obama administration into a government subsidy for its unprofitable solar panel production model; a model, in fact, that was so self-evidently unprofitable that funding it required that the administration ignore the steadily-increasing screams of disbelief and outrage from government bureaucrats… a group not, perhaps, too well-known for its whistle-blowing activities. (more…)

It was an argument made last week as part of the Democrats’ ongoing Well, It Could Be Worse initiative. The goal? To get out there the idea that, hey, sure, the Obama administration was maybe incompetent – but at least it was clean! That counts for something, am I right?

ABC News, asking one of those questions that kind of assumes that the answer is already known, but merely needs to be revealed. One caustic drop at a time.

“Did a half billion dollars of your tax payer money go to a company certain to fail? And why?”

…Yeah, those conversations rarely end well. Background on the ongoing Solyndra debacle here: short version is that the White House deliberately pushed for loans – and let me say the magical words of DOOM, here: “WITHOUT DUE DILLIGENCE” – for a greentech company that they knew was busily going bankrupt. Half a billion bucks down the rathole, paper trail out the front door, and the scalping knives are out.

Should be a thing.

Moe Lane

PS: You’re probably muttering something right now about how this will distract from, say, Operation Fast & Furious (by the way, BATFE just had to admit that walked guns have been linked to three more murders). Au contraire: this merely means that Energy & Commerce is going to be ‘competing’ with Oversight & Government reform for headlines. I note ‘competing’ because, really, there’s room for both.